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In Paris, all but 2% of the theatres are still under lock & key. At one extreme, the haughty, highbrow Comédie Française gives three "matinees" a week, from 6 to 9 p.m. At the other extreme is the Concert Mayol, a revue in the style of the Fol¡es-Bergère or Bal Tabarin, but much coarser and nuder. With the Tabarin closed, the Mayol—catering to soldiers and dirty-minded old men—is hiring the Tabarin's famed chorines and boasting with a smack of the lips, "Nous aurons de la bonne volatile" ("Plenty of white meat, boys"). Up in arms is the whole Paris press over the Mayol's "war specialty": Girls caught during a raid without gas masks follow the lead of the Canadians caught in the first German gas attacks in 1915.
'No war song has yet captured Paris. Great efforts were made to have Maurice Chevalier launch something called Victoire, la fille de Madelon,† but he backed out on discovering it was a stinkeroo. Soldiers themselves are still content with time-honored bawdy snatches.
In Berlin, with sidewalk cafés closed and few new films available, most of the theatres are booming. Workers are urged to go to the theatre straight from work, no longer need wear collars & ties. This invitation brings them in droves, though it keeps hoity-toity society folk away.
The State theatres ladle out the classics —Goethe, Schiller, Shakespeare. It is emphasized that the Germans are too "cultured" to ban French and English dramas because of the war, and more Shakespeare—as well as some Wilde and Shaw—is announced for this winter.
Only well-known actor at the Front is Karl Ludwig Diehl. Still appearing nightly in Munich is button-nosed, Hitler-shaped Weiss Ferdl, whose irreverence to the Nazis before war broke out cost him many a fine, once landed him in Dachau's concentration camp. All Germany knows his favorite gag. He raises his arm as if to give the Nazi salute, then says: "At Dachau, the snow is that high."
* For other British war songs, see p. 47.
†Madelon was the great French marching song during World War I.